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Nerval's Lobster writes with one take on an effort to "make Internet access available to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected": "In conjunction with a variety of partners (including Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung), Facebook is launching Internet.org, which will try to make Internet access more affordable to more people. The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences, which could help people in areas with poor connectivity access online services, and devise incentives for businesses and manufacturers to offer customers more affordable access. Why would Facebook and its partners want to connect another 5 billion people to the Internet? Sure, there are altruistic reasons — people online can access information that will improve or even save their lives. But for Facebook, more people online equals more ad revenue, which equals more profit. Social networking in the developed world is reaching a saturation point, with a significant percentage of the population already on one (or more) social networks; only by expanding into developing nations can Facebook and its ilk maintain the growth rates that Wall Street demands. In a similar vein, building devices and services accessible via weaker Internet connections would open up a whole new customer base for the app developers and manufacturers of the world. In theory, Internet.org plans on enlisting a variety of nonprofits and 'experts' to help in its effort; but the initial announcement only lists for-profit companies among its constituency. NGOs, academics and the aforementioned experts will apparently arrive 'over time.' So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?"

As much as I hate to admit it, for once Bill Gates is right. People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.

Advertisers often will pay big bucks to get into emerging markets. Companies will sometimes take a decade of loss in order to ingrain themselves with some new population, or even better make that population dependent on their product while it is still cheap/free (example: free baby formula)

The least develop countries are growing really fast and they are on the cusp of a breakout. Sadly, they have been in this position 2, 3 times during the 20th century and have failed, but maybe this time is different. On top of that a lot of their population is immigrating to the first world, repatriating money back. If these people join, the sticky network effect comes into play.

And for all the cynicism out there, corporations just don’t look to next quar

The least developed countries are not a homogeneous mass. Some of the countries that were in the "least developed" category in the early 20th century have broken out. Greece is one example. It is in a bit of a mess at the moment, but nowhere near as bad as the 3rd world military dictatorship status it had in 1945. China is another. Some countries have been less successful. Of the current "least developed" countries, some will be successful in the future, some won't. Some countries are relatively pros

Because it is demonstrably false, and only posted to elicit a reaction. Thus it is flamebait.

BG's charity is NOT set up to produce dependency. He is not giving away food, he is trying to cure diseases, improve literacy, etc. If polio or malaria is eradicated, it is gone, and there is no ongoing dependency. Improved literacy makes people less dependent on charity. Etc.

The dependency cycle is a big problem with government-to-government aid (mostly food handouts and military aid). It is rarely a problem with the type of bottom-up aid that BG is doing.

BG's charity is NOT set up to produce dependency. He is not giving away food, he is trying to cure diseases, improve literacy, etc. If polio or malaria is eradicated, it is gone, and there is no ongoing dependency. Improved literacy makes people less dependent on charity. Etc.

Yes; then and only then can the sale of Microsoft Office suites begin!

I kid (mostly), but even if for self-serving interests, he's done a helluva lot more for the world with his filthy lucre than Steve Jobs ever bothered with (thus hi

even if for self-serving interests, he's done a helluva lot more for the world with his filthy lucre than Steve Jobs ever bothered with

True, but BG did very little before he retired. Steve Jobs never got a chance to retire. He might have been judged differently if he had lived to 80 or 90. I have done well in life, but have given very little to charity. I plan to help someday, but for now I am just too busy, and too many charities seem to spend all their money on fundraising, or on activities with detrimental unintended consequences. In fact, the most effective charity that I can see is BG's foundation. Do they accept donations?

I give a bunch of money to charity. I thought it was normal. Then I mentioned to someone at work about headaches of getting it right on the tax forms and he was utterly amazed that I gave away money and thought that the whole idea was foolish.

I've never really 'liked' Bill Gates, but I have admired the fact that he's a tycoon who got to where he is by not exploiting third world non-white people as most other billionaires do.

If you think about it, the 'shady but successful business practices' really only screwed other rich white people and didn't enslave entire third world countries and rape their resources like most other non-tech billionaires. For that, I see BG as an evolutionary step forward in the ecosystem of greedy business men.

The phrase "trying to buy a name as a good guy" comes across as a criticism to me. Specially, I read it you essentially you saying:

"He is trying to whitewash his legacy. And we need to call him out on it so that his attempt to 'buy' a good name is defeated. He should go down in history for the bad things he has done, not the good things he did afterwards to try distract us from the bad."

That's pretty cynical. It might be true. But I've got no reason to believe he's not genuinely interested in doing good for

I think you are reading more cynicism into my words than I put in there. Which is odd because I'm normally pretty cynical and this time I wasn't.

If he does more good for the world than bad then he should be remembered for the good. It's quite likely his charity work will outweigh the bad of Microsoft's business practices by a few thousand times.

As much as I hate to admit it, for once Bill Gates is right. People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.

Except those basics are often unavailable because of a lack of good government, and good government almost never happens without an informed population.

You could correct that with plain old newspapers and one room schoolhouses, however. You don't need the Internet to generate a population that understands the need for good government. Indeed, you need to mainly be literate already in order to get much out of the Internet to begin with.

I'm not suggesting that they stop with what they are doing, but many times these programs spend a lot of money on something, but the maintenance costs are high, or the locals don't have the skills to maintain it themselves.

You could correct that with plain old newspapers and one room schoolhouses

Except that the newspapers are censored and the schoolhouses are run by the government.

You don't need the Internet to generate a population that understands the need for good government.

You don't need the internet to understand the need, but you do need people-to-people communication to make it happen. Cellphones have had an enormous effect in Africa, both economically and politically. They allow common people to bypass government controlled cartels, banks, and media. They also allow citizens to hang around polling places and immediately upload photos of anyone intimidating voters or tampering with t

I'm not sure how the Internet is going to save you if the government is that determined to maintain control. Yes, it has had an effect in places where access cropped up before the dictators knew what was happening, but if they're watching the news, they know the danger it represents.

And again, I am sure it can all have a positive effect, and I am not discounting the potential, but I don't know that it is the most efficient way of getting the job done. If your problem is that the government may control thi

Well lets look at it a different way. The internet is heavily controlled in China, so it doesn't help with democracy. However people can make things and put them up for sale on Alibaba and E-bay, and that improves their standard of living in a way that wouldn't be possible without the internet.

Well lets look at it a different way. The internet is heavily controlled in China, so it doesn't help with democracy.

It hasn't helped yet. China's economy has grown by better than 10% annually for more than 30 years. That is better than any other country has ever accomplished. The government would not be voted out with a record like that. The test of democracy in China will come with the first big economic downturn. That will likely happen sometime in the next ten years.

And providing access to the internet might have unintended consequences. Notice how the internet is turning the first world into nations of drooling idiots. Do we want the same thing to happen to the third world as well?

The internet is NOT giving us better information than we used to have, it is actually helping to isolate people into echo chambers. We actually hear about a tornado on the other side of the country in minutes if there are some good pictures of it, but we may never hear about corruption at

If food, sanitation, and health care are unavailable because of a lack of good government, what makes you think Internet access would be any different (especially since, as you imply, it would be used to undermine the existing government)?

If food, sanitation, and health care are unavailable because of a lack of good government, what makes you think Internet access would be any different?

Reality. There is plenty of data available. Food aid is negatively correlated with future hunger and poor economic growth. It depresses local food prices, discourages investment in agriculture, and strengthens the authority of centralized and corrupt governments. Internet and cellphone access is strongly correlated with economic progress and government reform.

Even health care aid often does less good that many realize. Vaccinations are very cost effective. Other health care aid, not so much. When cha

Yeah right, because Europe and USA didn't developed without internet in the 1800s and 1900s.I would like to add that actually the interweb now is doing a favor to the corrupt governments, because now we think that our wild rage in a blog and a couple of night in zuccotti park can change something, while the old way of doing things of, let say, the civil rights movement where far more effective because people were more resilient and less prone to stop the protest to update their bookface profile.

I think the AC is spot on, Internet practically didn't exist to most people until the 1990s. That you took two seconds out of your day to "like" something is a lot less impressive than anyone willing to spend time and effort to show that this is really, really important to them. That the Internet takes away the effort also tends to take away the impact.

As much as I hate to admit it, for once Bill Gates is right. People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.

They can both exist. Bill Gates can push the bare essentials and, Facebook and Google will try to get the folk connected.

Yeah, people tend to forget that this is not a zero sum game, and multiple problems can be worked on at once.

I also suspect that in the first world we find it easier to relate to 'no food' then to 'no communication', so many people latch onto that problem. We have all been hungry off and on, we have all been sick off and on, and we can picture more extreme versions. However mass communication is so utterly embedded in our culture that we do not even think about it, and we pretty much never exist without

We have all been hungry off and on, we have all been sick off and on, and we can picture more extreme versions.

No, I don't think we really picture more extreme versions. I've never gone more than a day without eating, have you? Hungry is a long way from starving, or being chronically malnourished, or worrying that you will go hungry if the next harvest fails. Unless you have cancer, sick probably means a bad flu. You'll get better. Untreated malaria or hookworm are different - they're chronically debilitating diseases that often start young and return periodically. They often keep people from working, so they can't

Actually, I have gone for more then a day without eating, but you make a good point. Though even if we can not accurately picture more extreme versions, we generally _think_ we can. From a few thousand miles away and through the lens of public policy, fundraising, or forum rants, that is close enough.

And agreed, getting people to believe and use it is also one of the problems in the chain of bork, and should not be underestimated.

As much as I hate to admit it, for once Bill Gates is right. People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.

Where do you start to improve things? All the aid given to Africa has achieved alarmingly little. If these people have access to information they are much more capable of improving their situation long term than if they had a bag of rice instead.

No he isn't. As an economist in one African country said: the mobile phone companies have had a bigger positive impact on the economy and well-being of the people than any governmental or NGO-led programme. Mobile phones are not the same thing as Internet, I know, but in the end they both offer what those people need: information and a means of communicating. This has helped them with things like emergency response, information and education (for example: on basic sanitation and issues around drinking wa

Gapminder.Org [gapminder.org] is a GREAT site for seeing how things have improved for the entire world's population over the past 200 years. Dozens if not hundreds of variables are available for plotting. If you let the default graph of life expectancy over income per person play out, you'll see that every country has seen vast improvements over that span.

The Sub-Saharan African countries in particular didn't really see much improvement until the end of WWII, but since then the average life expectancy has gone from aroun

Many people do live like that and not just in Africa, South America has massive problems with access to clean water there are plenty of places in the world where only 20% of kids make it too their 5th birthday!

People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.

But they still also need the Internet, not only because it contains information on disease treatment and sanitation but also because communication infrastructure makes it far easier to build other infrastructure and get out of poverty. You don't need more than an Internet connection to start offering services world-wide nowadays,

How are the poor starving children in third world slums supposed to get food if they can't order it online? They also need to use Wikipedia to find out if the ulcerated sores on their feet are due to lack of nutrition or a parasitic infection. There are also good DIY guides online about how to build your own sewage system. And just think of all the awesome kitten videos they will be posting!

I don't see why it can't be both? If you provide them with access to the internet they can learn about how to sanitize water or help grow food. absolutely we should do whatever we can to help bootstrap them and get them going, but if we just continue to give them shit forever how will they ever advance? teach a man to fish, you know the addge.

Perhaps that is the overall effect of what his strategy is, but I would have a hard time believing that it is his goal to give away billions of dollars just to feel superior to third world countries. He could already do that AND hold on to billions of dollars.

Generally with the people like Gates, the more realistic charge is they are trying to buy their way into heaven or posterity.

In any case, I do think that Gates is actually trying to do his best, but Gates is/was a businessman. He works his deals with

It's a common fallacy that anything a corporation does that is profitable is necessarily evil. Corporations have no sense of ethics - their actions can have good or bad results, but they don't act with the intention of being good or evil.

If Facebook starts providing free Internet access to Bumblefuck Nowhere and makes ad profit, but the Internet access is unrestricted and can be used for anything, that's a win-win situation.

So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?

Why can’t it be both? If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand of bottom up price signals are far better than a altruistic top down approach. (And if somebody accuse me of being a evil Liberation I will point out that is a different argument – different level and types of regulations will affect the market and price signals and the society you get. As the OP said, if the internet provided is free and unres

Well, actually what we have learned over the last 50 years is you have to balance top down and bottom up, and either of them being too dominant fails. They both have their place and work best when the other is also in play.

Partly right. Corporations have no sense of ethics, but they are selfish. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that they can't act beneficial (the whole market theory revolves around egoistic entities finding the price points where everyone benefits the most)

So charitable actions are not evil, but usually geared towards raising profits as a side effect (as facebook here or MS getting kindergarden kids hooked on MS Office) or geared to increase the organisations reputation.

It's a common fallacy that anything a corporation does that is profitable is necessarily evil.

You're attacking a straw man. Nobody said this was evil, or that it would be harmful to the worlds poor. At most they said it won't help the poor, and the claim that it will is a misleading way to describe market expansion.

Facebook has always been the NSA's wet dream. Of course they'd love to have the entire planet hooked on it. Third world countries with no Internet access are insignificant to online-based advertising since they most likely have no disposable income or access to good distribution channels to buy the advertised products & services. On the other hand, these people live where intelligence gathering is more challenging and more valuable. So I'm convinced it's actually more about security interests, not commercial ones.

If you teach a kid to fish, he can eat cholera infested fish for the day. If you teach a kid to program, he can get himself a sub-minimum wage outsourced job from the other side of the world and still make more than his entire village.

(Technically I do it because I'm learning a little bit at a time and want to understand how things work. Probably a hold over from Word vs Word Perfect or the 'Frontpage' days where a WP document had 'Reveal Codes' and I could make sure I didn't have 10 font changes that happened before the final font change. Before I was on computers, I used a typesetting machine where there wasn't a WYSIWYG interface; it was _all_ codes. So keeping the document clean was

Wait one.1. He didn't say he refuses to use modern tools. He says he is learning among other things what clean code looks like by making it so. Thus he learns the criteria and what the modern tools are likely doing under the hood [my conclusion].2. Doing code by hand does not automatically guarantee inefficient or badly laid out code. Such hours he spends are spent learning. Will you argue that's a bad thing to do?3a. "Rolling his own functions" does re-implement existing code. That it be poorly don

Let me state this now. I am not a paid programmer, although I was one back in the mid-80's. I'm a Unix Sysadmin. The programming I do is for my own personal stuff with almost no external users. I do have a few apps I want to write for a broader user base though. That's part of the reason for learning.

With that, when I'm doing this for my own code, I'm interested in how things are under the hood. How things work. Certainly the guy who created JQuery didn't set out to create something called 'JQuery'. He roll

I firmly believe that internet access is a human right, in many places sought out before running water. Its potential enable mass communication, and information sharing is unparallel.The problems with mass internet in the last 5-7 years have been the efforts to restrict it. Blocking server traffic, locking down phone and tablet OSs, and strictly screening the software that one gets to use on a new computer platform. The attempt is to lock it into an infotainmaint platform strictly regulated by a handful of

Look at the populations without internet access - they're also in the population of the world that actually has to worry about starving to death, about persistent government corruption, filled with often violent superstitions and beliefs, lack of access to either medical supplies or trained medical care, completely unaware of farming or grazing techniques that were in use in the 15'th century or living literally, on piles of garbage.

You're really going to worry that these folks will potentially be uplifted

"The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences..."

IOW, they want a larger base of people who have fewer rights and who can't easily sue, upon which to experiment with more sophisticated tracking methods. Getting an identifying code from your phone shouldn't be too hard, after all - linking that to the facebook account logged into with the phone allows facebook to then link to what ever other sites you visit (again with your phone s

Interesting contrast between Facebook and Google here - Facebook wants to organize all these companies and NGOs (each of which will have an agenda), where Google says (with Project Loon, http://www.google.com/loon/ [google.com]), let's just get them access and not try to overprescribe how it evolves or what they do with it - continuing with their "a rising tide lifts all boats", abundance mentality.

Yes, Google benefits. The point is, they aren't worried about if others do as well - get people connected, FTW (and some of that win is Google's, sure). That's abundance thinking. FB, on the other hand, may very well be focusing on things that will specifically put more people on their social network, without driving general capability.(a lower-data format that they will dovetail with their development efforts for a low-bandwidth client).

would this be best done by a bunch of guys driving out and building a MESH or by flying a C-5 galaxy with a Mobile Com station (and a couple companies of "civilian contractors" to help guard the stuff) out to key locations??

You can trust that these companies have a profit motive to bring electricity & internet out there, so you can understand their path. It clearly has parallels to altruistic behavior for now, so lets enjoy those parallels while we know why they exist (because we understand their mindset).

Keep in mind our population experiences steady linear growth, so expecting the economy to keep pace with that is not unreasonable nor a ponzi scheme. When your resources are increasing it is healthy for your economy to increase too.

I have no study to justify my theory, but I wouldn't be at all shocked if population-based economic growth rates in the third world are a number of percentage points behind what the typical equity analyst expects in a corporate earnings forecast.

It's interesting to watch the timeline in Internet Archive [archive.org]. The website has hosted various content over years. The latest snapshots seem to show some kind of tongue-in-the-cheek website with pictures of scenery in Europe where "internet" is being carried by boats and cable cars (the cables are lubricated using pork fat).

Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.

Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. Available resources may be zero-sum, but how they are allocated is not. If I have some food, but I'm bored rather than hungry, and you're hungry but have only a non-edible DVD, we both benefit from swapping the food and the movie. A different allocation of the same resources results in a net gain, with no externalized costs.

Capitalism is all about allocating resources to where they can do the most good through a mass of individual trades, each of which is expected—by

Your example describes something known as barter which has, for the purpose of zero-sum game discussion, nothing to do with capitalism.

On the contrary, private ownership of property and unhindered, voluntary trade between individuals, particularly in regard to capital goods, is pretty much all there is to capitalism. Those are the only preconditions; if you can barter without third-party interference or the threat of being deprived of your property by force, a capitalistic economy will inevitably develop. My example was intentionally trivial, but the principle applies equally well to trade in land, machinery, labor, or any other kind of go

At it's most basic, Capitalism is simply one method for allocating goods and services. In effect raw materials and the work needed to changes those raw materials into something else.

Since both raw materials and work are finite how can Capitalism be anything other than a zero sum?

At best you can limit the frame of reference to trades inside a certain economic area or time frame or both, but then you are just externalising the raw materials coming from outside the area or outside of the timeframe (by rem

Since both raw materials and work are finite how can Capitalism be anything other than a zero sum?

That's true if you assume that technology and methods of organization can't be improved. Somehow though, with the same availability of raw materials (actually far less per capita) and the same amount of potential work per capita, we have a higher standard of living than they did in the Stone Age, or for that matter the first half of the 20th century.

By the definition of altruism, no. They could however be motivated by profit and have a beneficial effect. That's why most of us accept capitalism for most things. The important question here is not whether they're being altruistic, but what (if any) beneficial effect it will have.

Yes, people need to "get out of their way" so they can find their own way to make money, but that requires a few basics from society: a half-decent not totally corrupt government, an economy not entirely controlled by monopolistic rentiers, crime that isn't the dominant economic sector, some level of public health (e.g. screens on the outhouse), and some basic education and communication with other places. An infrastructure that allows reasonable transport of people and goods helps too.